Day: March 25, 2012

Every now and again, my friend Janice and I meet at a Starbuck’s to solve all of the ills of the world. Our biggest problem is getting someone to listen but that’s another story.

We’ll grab a cup and sit in some comfy chairs and start with any number of topics. In this case, we were talking about the best way to manage files on the iPad. When you come from a DOS/Windows background like both of us and file structures are second nature, the concept of file sharing and managment is a little difficult to imagine a robust solution.

But, she thought that she had a solution. Have you tried “Cloudon” she asked? I hadn’t so it was a “tell me more, tell me more” moment.

It’s an interesting concept. It’s quite obvious what the Cloud part is when you run it for the first time. You’re logging into something that’s going to let you work with modern versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The File Menu is not accessible but the parts of Powerpoint that I use regularly are all available. So far so good. I’m thinking that creating a Powerpoint Presentation from scratch would be very tedious in this manner but it gets better.

Key to this program is that you connect your Dropbox to the the application. So, I connect it and I know that I have a 10MB presentation in there. I locate the presentation and it loads very nicely into the editor. From here, I’m able to edit and refine the work. Very nice.

From the Slideshow menu, I’m running the presentation as it was intended. Very impressed now. Connect the iPad to a data projector and I’m envisioning a really portable presentation solution.

It only takes a few minutes and I’ve tested out the functionality of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Very sweet. I can see why Janice liked the application. I play around for a while and I can see all kinds of use for this. With the ability to store files in Dropbox, I have the file management concepts that I was missing. As long as I’m in the cloud, I’m good to go.

I see doing the editing on a regular computer or on the iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard and then firing it up to Dropbox for storage and sharing. The possibilities of making this portable and part of the editing/presenting cycle is intriguing.

Lab Out Loud is a podcast, hosted by two science teachers, that discusses science news and science education by interviewing leading scientists, researchers, science writers and other important figures in the field.

Much of the anxiety around tweens and social media lies in the fear that they don’t care about or understand privacy settings. Parents worry that kids will either willingly or unintentionally expose themselves to dangerous anonymous predators, or that they don’t fully understand that the information they share about themselves can be used against them.

Apple reports schools in more than 600 districts have bought iPads for all of their students. And it’s not happening just in wealthy suburbs. Schools in urban districts like New York City and Chicago are also handing out iPads.

Children learn social skills by interacting freely with peers. Playgrounds provide an opportunity for children from different classrooms to interact and enhance skill development. What if there was a place for the teachers to play, learn new skills, and network with others?

Google’s Chromebooks haven’t exactly made a splash, but apparently not everyone has been scared off. Sony seems to think there’s gold in them thar laptops, and they’re making their own. For now it’s known as the VCC111 (probably shorthand for “Vaio Chromebook Computer, series one, 11-inch display”), according to documents and pictures from FCC testing.

The other day I was looking through a box of old Apple II diskettes (I was trying to find this, to explain to my wife who Dr.J is) when I found something I had forgotten all about: a 1986 disk from Buick that is, essentially, a website that predates the web. I loaded the 26 year old disk into my old Apple //c, and, after a few tries, it booted. What I found was simply amazing.

Measuring the value of social media has been a challenge for marketers. And with good reason: it’s hard to understand exactly what is happening in an environment where activity occurs both on and off your website. Since social media is often an upper funnel player in a shopper’s journey, it’s not always easy to determine which social channels actually drive value for your business and which tactics are most effective.

If you step back far enough, beyond the ever-present Facebook vs. Google or apps vs. browser debates, what you see is a tug-of-war that has been going on ever since the internet first started to hit the mainstream: the battle of open vs. closed, between the web giants and platforms that want to control almost every aspect of your online life and the traditionally open nature of the internet.

Facebook’s chief privacy officer Erin Egan has sent a warning to social network’s users: never give your password to your employer. It’s wrong and it’s illegal for them to ask you. In fact, the US Senate is working on a bill to specifically ban this despicable tactic.